The tragedies behind the statistics
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
— Joseph Stalin
Much has been made of the death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And rightfully so. The story of his alleged gruesome murder at the hands of a Saudi hit-team inside the country's consulate in Istanbul is not something the average person has to hear and replay in their heads every day—with the help of some imagination.
His story has gained so much traction that it has forced thousands of people around the world, numerous international organisations and even the western mainstream media to call on their leaders to take action against the kingdom, including to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The calls have been so loud that they have already forced Germany to stop selling armaments to the kingdom, with Amnesty International calling on the governments of Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump to follow suit given the devastation that has been caused in Yemen, using weapons manufactured in their respective nations.
This is where one should take a second to pause and think.
Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen has been raging now for three and a half years. That's three and a half years of one of the richest country in the region bombing one of the poorest in the world.
During this time, among the many changing narratives, the main justification used by Saudi Arabia to begin the war, which was pushed into the mainstream by none other than the western media (among others), had been that the kingdom intervened in Yemen on behalf of its president—Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi—who had been forcefully overthrown. Just like the said justification has been long forgotten, so was it forgotten at the time and unquestionably now that Hadi's term as president of Yemen had ended in February 2014, according to the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement initiative pushed through by Saudi Arabia, before the war had even begun. Making the Saudi claim of intervening in Yemen upon the request of its president untrue from the get-go.
However, as the infamous Nazi General Hermann Goering had said, "Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship."
So the truth is that the war in Yemen had always been about geostrategic interests. According to the father of modern geopolitics, US Navy officer and geostrategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had influenced the likes of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Whoever attains maritime supremacy in the Indian Ocean would be a prominent player on the international scene."
Unfortunately for the Yemenis, the Yemeni archipelago of Socotra in the Indian Ocean is located some 80 kilometres off the Horn of Africa and is at the crossroads of the strategic naval waterways of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. This strategic waterway links the Mediterranean to South Asia and the Far East, through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
As Amjed Jaaved wrote for the Pakistan Observer in July 2009, "The [Indian] Ocean is a major sea lane connecting the Middle East, East Asia and Africa with Europe and the Americas. It has four crucial access waterways facilitating international maritime trade, that is the Suez Canal in Egypt, Bab-el-Mandeb (bordering Djibouti and Yemen), Straits of Hormuz (bordering Iran and Oman), and Straits of Malacca (bordering Indonesia and Malaysia). These 'chokepoints' are critical to world oil trade as huge amounts of oil pass through them." Which means that whoever controls Socotra could potentially oversee the movement of vessels in and out of the Gulf of Aden, and gain authority over one of these chokepoints.
These facts, despite being well-known to western politicians, experts and media, are never mentioned. Even the war in Yemen itself rarely is. Perhaps because "tragedies" sell, "statistics" don't.
In spite of that, here are some. Since 2016, one of the worst famines in modern times has been going on in Yemen. According to rights groups, this has put over 17 million Yemeni lives at risk—Yemen's total population when the war began was estimated at 26 million. According to a November 2017 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, the famine in Yemen will soon reach "biblical proportions". Since then the famine has only worsened according to the Red Cross and others, as the continuing sea, air and land blockade of Yemen has been tightened.
Violence against women has increased 63 percent since the conflict escalated, according to UNFPA. Forced marriage rates, including child marriage, have increased.
As is the case in any war, the number of deaths in Yemen is impossible to estimate. One thing is for sure: that it is much higher than the estimates of 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 put forward by various international organisations and media outlets.
And although the majority of those killed from the outset have been civilians, a September 2018 report by The Guardian states that, "Civilian deaths in Yemen have surged dramatically since June after the Saudi-led coalition began an offensive to take the key port city of Hodeidah." Quoting figures collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, it goes on to say that, "civilian deaths in the Yemeni conflict have increased by 164% in the four months since the Hodeidah offensive started."
Generally speaking, what the Yemenis have been suffering for the past three and a half years is a nightmare that the average person rarely, if ever, has to hear or replay in their heads. Part of that is because it has failed to get as much media attention during the entirety of the conflict as the alleged grisly murder story of Jamal Khashoggi has, in only a matter of weeks.
If it had, perhaps the calls to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia would have come earlier and more voraciously—sparing the lives of who knows how many people. Because as I mentioned earlier, the statistics of how many individual tragedies have been caused in Yemen are still missing today.
Eresh Omar Jamal is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star. His Twitter handle is @EreshOmarJamal.
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